Not a teenager to be found anywhere in the house these days. Who am I supposed to embarrass now? I’ve been aged out of the job.

I was thinking that tonight at Costco as I found myself turning down an aisle full of pasta of all kinds. I wanted to break out into song and dance, maybe holding my cane up by either end, waving my arms in time to the music: “Udon oh! what it’s like…”

Cheerful embarrassings create the memories the kids tell to tease their parents with in their old ages.

I think my kids have a good stash socked away by now, ready for needling.

The postal service here has major problems, has for years.

And so it happened that I noticed that hey, it’s time to renew on my car but why didn’t the bill come? I called my mechanic, got the car smog-inspected today, then drove up to the DMV to walk it through in person, glad I’d remembered it was that time of year.

Where I got told the post office had returned my registration as undeliverable.

Like when they told my credit card company that I was addressee unknown despite our having lived in the same house over 20 years. (Yeah, that got me online fast.)

Or the times… Never mind. Pride and suppressed outrage are not a pretty combination.  Here we go again.

So I went looking for ways out of those emotions.  First, though, go do what needs to be done.

I pulled out my ball of yarn and empty needles to get started. I’d been expecting to plunk down on the floor, because I can’t do standing for long, but it turns out the DMV provides chairs now and gives you a number as you walk in the door; so much better now.  I caught the occasional eye looking at my growing stitches and smiled back across the rows of seats.

There was a young father with a small child and a one-year-old in his arms who was delightful, then tired, and then, finally, had just plain had enough of holding still in a strange place full of strange people.

A smiling snail to go over his finger would make a cute mascot for the place; there you go.

People behind them whom they didn’t even see lit up just like they did, glad for a dad and his boys: unexpected gifts of noticing are magical all around and their kindness made my day.

My turn at last.  The clerk, who had had to put up with endless fidgety people who wanted to be anywhere else and the endless mechanical voice summoning “J zero one nine, please come to window 8. J zero one nine” many times an hour eight hours a day day in day out, drowning out conversation, gave me a tired smile in the late afternoon and asked me briefly what I was knitting.  She was patient with my struggling hearing. I thanked her and for her help getting everything fixed.

Got my sticker. What a relief.  Coming home down the freeway, I wished the smog check had gotten finished earlier in the day and that the wait had been shorter in that line; I hit major rush hour, Christmas lights all lighting up red ahead in unison.

Forget it. I exited quite early, even though it meant doing 25 mph roads all the way across town. At least I’d be moving instead of just sitting there–I had done enough of that.

And so I found myself behind a car that had CAUTION CAUTION plastered across the back, a driving school sign on top. I was behind it for quite awhile. It must take nerves of steel to get in a car with an utter novice; at least, when I was teaching my kids to drive, they had already had two sessions with an instructor first.

I watched the driver overcorrect a bit trying to get safely past cars parked along the well-traveled road.

Finally, it widened to two lanes each way and I pulled up alongside at the long light. I thought about it. I waited for the green. I finally thought, oh, why not? Down went my window, and at the sound both the driver and her instructor turned. (His was open.)

I smiled and called over to her, “You’re doing great!”

She blushed and laughed, delighted and totally embarrassed, just as I knew she would be–I’ve been a teen and I’ve raised four of them–and the gruff-looking instructor actually smiled too. Well cool.

The light turned. She gave it a slow, cautious go.  On our way. And now that she wasn’t in front of me, I worked hard to stay at 25 and be a good example, because I knew she was watching me and I had darn well better! I was suddenly as self-conscious as a teenager with a strange adult in the car about trying to drive just right.

If only she knew so she could laugh at that too.

Just in case you need a little inspiration on the last minute Christmas knitting. Why not jazz up that boring Norwegian sweater with a bit of fun fur to light up the evening and sing karaoke for you? You, too, with Scooby Doo, can dance with the stars.

Okay, searching Ebay for Christmas sweaters was a joke. Little did I know that there was a competition for who could type UGLY in their header the biggest and loudest. This one begs the question: is it pre-Cindy Lou Who?

I am totally bowed over by this one. (So *that’s* what you do with the string of lights you could never get untangled!) But whoever designed this one was definitely having a ball.

There are already people wondering out loud why she didn’t have a cell phone with her. But she was going to an area she hiked and biked daily and knew well, and sometimes you just need some good outdoors time to reconnect with nature, not to feel tethered to the endless intrusions of a ringtone. Besides, if a mountain lion is going to get you, then they’ll know which cat it was when they call your phone inside it, right? Or not.

Whatever. Her home is surrounded by parkland. She went out on a walk.

She did not show up for work. Her boss and dear friend Tom called the sheriff.

Now, in the print story that went out earlier today, the sheriff refused to search for her. In the online version many hours later, there’s currently an update on her health status and a long explanation from his office about why they made the call they did.

It is curious to me the details that got removed from the story, though, with the shift in focus. Word got out that she was missing, and immediately her neighbors wanted to go look in the morning light to see if they could find her. A young dad took his seven-year-old son and they hiked two miles up the trail.

Now, two miles means four when you know you’ve got to get back again. They hadn’t found her, but it seemed as far out there as they were going to be able to make it, and you know how much they must have wanted to keep on going.

“Not a minute later” they happened to notice an unmarked trail they’d missed on the way up and with the sting of having accepted defeat a moment earlier, knowing what was at stake, they felt compelled to go down it.  Just five or ten minutes’ worth; couldn’t hurt.  We could do that. Giving up on their neighbor was just too hard to accept.

And there she was. She’d been there for six nights during a freezing snap, no food, a little water, by the creek, her ankle  in bad shape and trapped under the tree where she’d sought some shelter that first night.

Imagine that seven-year-old boy growing up knowing that together he and his father had pushed to the edge of what they thought he could physically do–and the fact that his father trusted him with sharing the burden of the task–and their having saved their neighbor’s life for it.  Imagine that father’s gratitude that he had decided to bring his son along with him, rather than dismissing it as too hard and too far for him to come too.

It takes a village to raise a child. And sometimes, the children help raise us back up on our feet and show us the way.

p.s. I love that the woman’s one request when the rescue crew arrived after the dad called them was for a glass of, but of course, lemonade.

Let’s see, can’t find ground pecans, we’ll try this almond meal at Trader Joe’s; long as we’re here, let’s use their vanilla butter wafers to pulverize with it, a little fresh almond paste from Milk Pail, got the grade B maple syrup, and what? No organic oranges? Skip that then.

(I did a mashup between the kringle and the strudel.)

Okay, no way am I going to roll out the butter/flour layers a bajillion times. Just make a sweet roll recipe, that’ll do.

So I did that and rolled it pie-crust thin on parchment paper twice, put the filling on one layer, topped it with the second layer, pinched the edges tight, and got–

–dang. Much glorified, but.  A giant Poptart!

I think it’s time to go knit.

When you live in Silicon Valley and Christmas is coming and you’re surrounded by geeks, even I the shawl-knitting house elf think this is just really really cool.  I mentioned it to my husband and he said that in Europe they sell Android watches already that link to your phone so you can read your incoming text messages, etc etc, on your wrist. Like this will do for Apple’s product that I always thought was too hopelessly small not to lose. Well then.

Dick Tracy, your future called and left you a text saying it has arrived at the station. Where it’s okay to let some little old lady take your seat on the subway while you stand and hold onto the overhead strap–so you can secretly listen to your music and messages with your arm up near your ears.

(I don’t even own a Nano and neither does the husband, but if they ever start making one that you can link to a knitting needle to create a gorgeous high-whorl spindle on demand with a holding case for the fiber to be compressed into the watch, then I want the first one.)

Thank you, everybody. I was doing better today but was afraid to push it, so I waited: I had Knit Night coming up and I really wanted to be able to knit there but I also knew there would be a lot of knit/stop/laugh/knit/stop/swap stories going on at Purlescence to keep me from overdoing it–and it was so. It was the best way to ease into it. (Pass the icepacks.)

It was so good to be among knitters. Including one I haven’t seen in far too long–I didn’t even recognize Ava at first, visiting from out of state.  She, bless her, recognized me.

I am so glad I didn’t let a little lupus get in the way of my going!

I’m not knitting.

I have a rheumatologist who, the last time my lupus attacked my fingers, exclaimed, “But you NEED your knitting! We have to *do* something!”

And with that, he finally got me to try plaquenil, an antimalarial drug that, like aspirin, nobody reacts to, and as long as you get your eyes checked regularly for retina damage, everybody can take it.

And you know how well aspirin and I get along. (A thank you forever to my ENT and to heaven above for the rare chance to thank Rachel Remen in person as well; story in that first link.)

I got the most massive case of upper-body hives and we crossed another med category off my list.

I knitted yesterday anyway when I had a half hour wait at the pharmacy and then just couldn’t do it again. Hopefully this will all be a very brief interruption, but I’m afraid to push it for now.  I’m realizing I was getting casual about sun exposure: add it all up and I might have spent ten minutes outside in the sunlight yesterday, way beyond my safe point, rationalizing about the low UV levels this time of year. The cage does get old. And there’s so much that’s so pretty outside in a California winter.

Well, hey, there are other ways to be creative, and desserts have been calling me. Here’s one:

First, turn off your hearing aids, this is going to be loud. Ready?  Okay.  Frozen strawberries, a little sugar to taste, add some cream in the food processor.  Whirr for about a century, stopping every now and then to break up the strawberries that are absorbing just a bit of heat from the friction of the blade, (or maybe I just have to do that because my Cuisinart is very old), whirr some more till it’s smooth, serve immediately and there you go.

I used to use egg whites to make it a non-fat strawberry mousse, but after my daughter drove her friend Natalie to the hospital for salmonella poisoning during the egg scare last summer (no no she didn’t eat here), I’ve stopped doing that.

I handed my sweetie his.

“This is better than usual!”

Yes, well. Cream does that for it. It’s the side effects you have to be careful of.

Here’s hoping a good night’s sleep will leave me embarrassed for saying anything too soon and that my hands will be fine in the morning. I’m hoping.

A conversation with Sandra led to my going and looking…

Years ago I had two signature dishes: the chocolate torte, in its early stages (can you believe Hershey’s called for water in the cake when you could add manufacturing cream?), and maple pecan orange strudel, which I adapted from a recipe I scribbled down and took home after seeing it in a Redbook magazine circa 1990 while waiting for one of my kids to be seen by the pediatrician. (I write notes in my cookbooks to journal our food a little.) Thank heavens I forgot my knitting that day.

This is seriously good stuff. It’s also a serious amount of time and effort and calories and some of the ingredients are hard to find.  Those Danish butter cookies in the tins you see everywhere this time of year? This needs them to be without the coconut added in that so many have now for the preservative effect. Walker shortbread might work better; I haven’t checked their ingredients list lately, but it was coconut-free last time I did. I’ve tried just making my own and they weren’t quite as crunchy.

And the oranges? You really do want organic. I’ve tried, and the regular ones have a bitter aftertaste in the gratings that the organic ones just don’t. I have neighbors with trees (thank you Al J.), which helps a lot. Okay, here goes:

—————————

Maple Pecan Orange Strudel by Alison Hyde

Mix:

1 1/2 c finely ground pecans (a good source is here.)

1 c of finely crushed butter shortbread cookies, about 15 of the little Danish ones

1/4 c sugar

1/4 c maple syrup (don’t even THINK about substituting the fake stuff, you want knock-their-socks-off exquisiteness, that’s the whole point)

1 tbl finely grated orange peel, fresh and organic

1 tsp cinnamon

Mix these together and then take about a half pound of phyllo dough, 8-10 leaves. Watch the ingredients when you buy it: some are all butter, but some in the freezer case at the grocer’s are not. Lay them out with a barely damp but not wet towel over them. Take out one at a time, re-covering the others quickly, and lay out on a cookie sheet with slightly raised sides, ie a jellyroll pan, and brush with melted butter. Repeat till all are layered together; fill with mixture, leaving 2″ at the sides. Roll up like cinnamon roll dough, bake at 350 for 30 min.

While it’s baking, have 1 c sugar and 1 c water in a 1 qt pan, bring to boil and till the sugar is dissolved. Pour half of this over the strudel when you take it out of the oven; let it cool. Meantime, let the rest of the syrup boil another 6-8 minutes till it’s a deep amber. Shake the pot gently if needed to keep one side from burning before the other side turns color, but don’t stir.  Whip in (I have 1/4 c crossed out and 1/2 cup written in instead) of heavy cream with a wire whisk, pouring it in slowly so it doesn’t explode at you (watch your hands–the steam burst is hot!) to make a caramel sauce to serve it with. This may take vigorous work to get the suddenly solid sugar to melt into the cream. If you end up with a few solid leftover lumps, ignore them. Pour the sauce into a mini-pitcher without scraping the sides of the pan, which might dislodge crunchy sugar crystals you don’t want.

Run a finger around the pot later when no one’s looking to make sure it tastes just so. The cream will have cooled it down.

————————–

One note on maple syrup: traditionally, where it was produced, it was the poor man’s sugar and the grading was determined by how close it came to being substitutable. So if you can find it, grade B has a more pronounced maple flavor than the usual Grade A. I explained that once to a Trader Joe’s manager, and a few months later they started carrying Grade B! Cool.

Looking at Sunnyland Farms’ site to post that link, I see they’re now selling pecan oil. Hey. Michelle could eat that. Richard is hoping for a homemade cinnamon pecan kringle… HEY!

I apparently guessed right on the shape of kringles changing in Wisconsin. I did not know that the pretzel shape was an ancient guild symbol for a baker and still in use in Denmark.

Here, you can go read the rest yourselves if you’re interested; that recipe is calling me. As for the raspberry filled version I miss, I’m pretty sure I can come up with my own.

On the other hand, there is a certain practicality to being limited to what one can easily buy: when the calories are over, they’re over. And if I start making butter versions you know I’ll have to come up with an acceptable dairy-free one somehow too for an acceptable celebration, while avoiding all cross-contamination.

You know, I learned how to do handsmocking and many, many baby dresses and a great deal of knitting later, how to knit lace, because it just bugged me that here was something I thought was cool but that I didn’t know how to do yet.

I’ve baked a lot of bread in my life. Kringle?  This should be a piece of cake.

There’s a pattern brewing here… (The problem is that I would keep working at it and producing them till I reached an acceptable level of perfection in the creation. Which would only be the starting point.)

To top off our weekend with our son: the phone rang last night.

John’s apartment lease is up at the end of this month (like, now) and he did not want to sign for another year’s stint there. He was going to go Monday to sign the papers at a new place, wincing at the rent.

That phone call was an offer from a relative we know and love well, who knew none of that, who found himself suddenly needing a house sitter. Like, now.  Wondering if he might be interested in a room downstairs?  Free rent if he would bring in the mail and give them a call if anything happened like that time the neighbor’s tree fell on the house? Their leftovers fair game when they left town and his fair game any time they might arrive late at night?

I had no idea what the conversation was but I was watching his eyes go big. The generosity of the offer! And the *timing*!

When he gets back here for Christmas I think I need to send him back with a chocolate torte, ready for them to find in their freezer as leftovers. Wow. Thank you!

(Singing…)

You know those days when you do so many things so outside your normal routine that it feels like you’ve lived a week in the space of a waking?

One of those was that John and I, on a lark, drove up to Burlingame today. He drove; I wound a ball of Malabrigo Rios he’d picked out.

Okay, back up a little.

When I was ten and my family was doing that long drive circling the entire country with a little of Mexico (one afternoon) and Canada (several weeks) thrown in, Maryland to California and around and back that summer, one of the things we apparently did (I don’t remember it) was that we stopped in a Danish bakery in Racine, Wisconsin. (Mom and Dad, correct me if it goes further back than that.) Kringle? What’s that?  …OH!

The end result is that my folks have ordered kringle from that bakery every Christmas for four decades, through a change in generation and ownership quite awhile ago. The bakery does them in a racetrack oval, rather than the traditional pretzel-ish shape, and the things cover an entire cookie sheet: flaky dough rolled in butter to almost phyllo layers, filled with cooked-down fresh fruit or cinnamon pecan. It takes them three days to make them, and for many years you had to order by Halloween for the holiday season or you were plain out of luck.

We carried on the tradition here too about every other year or so, and a few years ago when we did, something was…different.  I checked the ingredients. When did they start cutting corners and putting in hydrogenated fat for part of the butter?

I googled for other bakers; Racine has become famous for kringles over the years.

I asked about the hydrogenated fat issue.

I struck out.

Kringles are a splurge in money and calories, and if they weren’t going to do it right, there was no point. Besides, Michelle can’t eat them anymore anyway.

But they are our tradition.  And Michelle’s not going to be home yet at my birthday.  So with rationalizations in hand, this year I went looking again.  One bakery in Illinois looked promising. One in Solvang quite surprised me–my friend John from Stitches and his wife own the Village Spinning and Weaving shop in Solvang in, judging by the pictures and the addresses, the same building! Small world.

And I found Copenhagen Bakery up in Burlingame, certainly within reach. Hey. Why not try it out?

And so John and I braved the rain and set out on an adventure. We did call ahead to make sure there would actually be one there.

They make the traditional pretzel shape, the traditional almond-paste filling. Only. (At least that they call by that name.)  I guess our fruit-filled oval ones were like chow mein in San Francisco: changed/reinvented by immigrants after they landed in the States. I explained to the woman at Copenhagen why we were experimenting and trying out their kringle and I asked if they put any hydrogenated fats in it?

She was horrified. No!

This evening, I finally closed the box to keep the three of us from finishing off the entire pastry in one day.

As for the yarn? John had said he needed me to go buy him a hat, and I was surprised and amused and countered that we had a ton of hats right here. Some Assembly Required. (An amused, *MOM*.) And so he chose the Azules colorway.

He didn’t really want me to post his picture with the hat in progress stuck on his head for measuring, four needle ends waving around his face.

But it is done. He has his hat. And we have a kringle source.

According to the post office, it was supposed to get there today. I have the tracking receipt around somewhere.

And here’s the other part of the story.  Last Christmas, I dragged my daughter into Purlescence and asked her advice on helping me pick out a yarn for an old friend whose wife I have yet to meet. Sam picked out a particular one that met the specs and that she thought would look good on anybody.

I knitted it up: after some thought, I used the Water Turtles pattern that I’d designed for my lifelong friend Karen. It just felt like the right one, even though it might have been cool to do one of the new ones? But, somehow, nah…

I finished it. It was time to tell the couple I’d made it for. And yet… Something felt not quite…  I didn’t know what.

And so it sat there. This quite honestly frustrated me at times because I really did want to get going on what I thought I’d started, giving-wise. But it was stubborn and it just wouldn’t go. Huh.

Okay, then, whatever. And I started keeping my eyes open for just the right shade of green to somehow fix that one, since it had been green and so green it was going to be if that green somehow wasn’t it. Must be the green’s fault.

I did not find anything that felt like *it*.  Stumped. Totally. For months now.

I finally pulled that Water Turtles shawl out recently to look it over, wondering why I’d made it, then, and it hit me like a boat straying under the falls at Niagara: duh! Karen’s widowed sister-in-law! Karen’s pattern! It’s soft, it’s half silk, the color matches the Alaskan pines, and if ever someone needed a warm hug and best wishes–what took me so long! I checked with Karen first to make sure Sally would like that shade; she gave me an enthusiastic go-ahead.

Today it should have arrived.

And today, despite the fact that we don’t do Black Friday crowds in our family–well, but Purlescence is okay, right? The owners had been there since 6 am in their jammies.  I got there in the late afternoon.  Old friends were there in abundance, I got to play with someone’s baby–

–And I found the exact, the most perfect, the most wonderful shade of green that somehow felt like the one I’d been waiting for all this time. I’d never seen it before.  Bingo. There you go.

I ignored it. I avoided it. I went all over the store, Kaye helping, looking for that color in something else, knowing if it wasn’t soft enough I wouldn’t buy it, but looking.

There was no other.  It had me and it knew it. I bought one ball, 230 yards, one lacy scarf in Cashmere Superior (brushed cashmere blended with silk) coming up.

It’s the right project. It’s the right yarn.  I got the shawl to whom it was absolutely meant for all along–and I hadn’t even ever heard Sally’s name yet while I was buying her her yarn.

To everything turn, turn, turn.  Now the sense that I’d been waiting for all this time is finally here: I have the exact right yarn for the person I started it all out for and it will be in their hands on its own right day, whyever that may be that I cannot know.  Their turn is coming up.

They don’t even know they’ve been waiting. Yet.

John’s home, John’s home! He even put up with doing a little birdwatching with me while I tried to explain why the Bewick’s wren flipping itself around by the tail was so cute.

The other bird watching: he and I got up this morning and decided to get that turkey going together. (My husband usually wrestles the yearly bowling ball, but we beat him to it and let him sleep in.)  I was going to roast it in a turkey bag, in part because it was only halfway thawed and that would help speed it up and even the cooking out, I thought. So, John held the flimsy thing ready for me–and twenty pounds of bird slipped straight through it to the floor.

So now we know why they put two bags in a box: one for the Julia Child moment, one for doing it right. I think we better move to over the pan, honey.

I later read some of the more infamous Butterball hotline questions: if I use a chainsaw to carve the bird, will the oil make it taste bad?

Or the college kid who used a cookie sheet under his because that’s all he had and it splattered and sparked and caught on fire in his oven, so he called the hotline.

The person at Butterball who answered that one was his own mother.  I bet they’ll be telling that one at their Thanksgiving dinners forever after!

We skipped the chainsaws and the fires and enjoyed a lovely time in a warm house on a cold day with good food and good family, feeling how keenly blessed we three were to have the time together. One-on-one time with an adult child is a rare thing.

And then for the first time in days I actually sat down, put my feet up, and knitted!

Humming James Taylor’s song that inspired the title. “Took a fall from a windy height, only knew how to hold on tight.”

The first bird I saw this morning when I came out into the family room was that vividly black and white-striped woodpecker, enjoying her breakfast. Good to have things back to normal.

My neighbors have a clothesline with a large, sturdy wooden post to either end, about half of the thing in view of my back window. Today I saw a black squirrel who apparently expected a telephone wire and tried to run down the rope. Twang! It flipped him, he grabbed for it, found himself suddenly clinging upside down while still trying to run the length; that didn’t work so well, so he scrambled to get back up to the top of it. Twang!  He edged away out of my sight, repeatedly being bounced, again and again.

Squirrel trampolines. Who knew.

A few minutes later, a black squirrel safely on the fenceline, (same one?) I looked up again and there, sitting on that post near him and in plain view was the big adult Cooper’s hawk with her blue upper head, sitting in the chilly sunshine.  Casually turning her head every now and then to watch some small bird and then another pass by overhead.  Checking out the entrees.  The squirrel seemed oblivious; she ignored him.

And lifted a big yellow foot and scratched herself. Ah, lovely day today, should make for a good flight.

Meantime I was picking up the phone and calling my neighbor. She ran across her house phone in hand to see the hawk from right there, and together we birdwatched across the telephone wire.

At last it stretched those huge wings wide and flapped off in no particular hurry across my yard. Nope–my feeder was finch-free on the far side too just then. Ah well then.

My neighbor told me about having recently watched a bird, she didn’t know what kind, swooping through snapping up the small cloud of termites that swarm here at the start of every rainy season, like catching popcorn as it bursts free of the popper. It was clearly enjoying the rare treat. Hey, little one: have seconds! Thirds! Bring your whole family, make it a feast!

It’s going to be cold enough tonight and tomorrow night that it could actually snow. The rain doesn’t come till the day after, so it looks like the 1964 date for the last snowman-able amount will hold.  But it’s chilly, the little birds are eating up a storm at the feeders, and the big ones await their turn at them. All is in balance.

And we have another flight we’re watching for. John is almost home! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!